“Well... is there anything we can do, now, except get ourselves killed in a fit of messy heroism?”
“No. I see no out-way. That doess not mean none exists. Best to follow the scent ass laid, while snuffing after a new track.”
Langley nodded indifferently. He was too sick of the whole slimy business to care much as yet. Let the Centaurians win. They were no worse than anybody else. “O. K., Brannoch,” he said. “We’ll string along.”
“Excellent!” The giant shivered, as if with a nearly uncontrollable exuberance.
“You realize, of course,” said Valti, “that this means war.”
“What else?” asked Brannoch, honestly surprised.
“A war which, with or without nullifiers, could wreck civilization in both systems. How would you like, say, the Procyonites to come take over the radioactive ruins of Thor?”
“All life is a gamble,” said Brannoch. “If you didn’t load your dice and mark your cards —I know blazing well you do, too!—you’d see that. So far the balance of power has been pretty even. Now we will have the nullifier; it may tip the scales very far indeed, if we use it right. It’s not a final weapon, but it’s potent.” He threw back his head and shook with silent laughter.
Recovering himself: “All right. I’ve got a little den of my own, in Africa. We’ll go there first to make preliminary arrangements—among other things, a nice convincing synthetic dummy, Saris” corpse, for Chanthavar to find. I can’t leave Earth right away, or he’d suspect too much. The thing to do is tip my hand just enough to get declared persona non grata, leave in disgrace—and come back with a fleet behind me!”
Langley found himself hustled outside, onto a slope where snow crackled underfoot and the sky was a dark vault of stars. His breath smoked white from his mouth, breathing was keen and cold, his body shuddered. Marin crept near him, as if for warmth, and he stepped aside from her. Tool!
No... no, he Wasn’t being fair to her, was he? She had been under a gas when she betrayed him, with less will of her own than if someone had held a gun at her back. But he couldn’t look at her now without feeling unclean.
A spaceship hovered just off the ground. Langley walked up the ladder, found himself a chair in the saloon, and tried not to think. Marin gave him a glance full of pain and then took a seat away from the others. A couple of armed guards, arrogant blond men who must be Thorians themselves, lounged at the doors. Saris had been taken elsewhere. He was not yet helpless, but his only possible action would be the suicidal one of crashing the ship, and Brannoch seemed willing to chance that.
The mountains fell away under their keel. There was a brief booming of sundered air, and then they were over the atmosphere, curving around the planet toward central Africa.
Langley wondered what he was going to do with himself, all the remaining days of his life. Quite possibly Brannoch would establish him on some Earth-type world as promised—but it would be inside the range of his own and Solar culture, marked for eventual conquest, it would not be what he had imagined. Well—
He wouldn’t see the war, but all his life there would be nightmares in which the sky tore open and a billion human creatures were burned, flayed, gutted, and baked into the ground. And yet what else could he have done? He had tried, and failed... wasn’t it enough?
No, said the New England ancestor.
But I didn’t ask for the burden.
No man asks to be born, and nevertheless he must bear his own life.
I tried, I tell you!
Did you try hard enough? You will always wonder.
What can I do?
You can refuse to surrender.
Time slipped by; so many minutes closer to his death, he thought wearily. Africa was on the dayside now, but Brannoch’s ship went down regardless: Langley supposed that something had been flanged up, fake recognition signals maybe, to get it by the sky patrols. There was a viewscreen, and he watched a broad river which must be the Congo. Neat plantations stretched in orderly squares as far as he could see, and scattered over the continent were medium-sized cities. The ship ignored them, flying low until it reached a small cluster of dome-shaped buildings.
“Ah,” said Valti. “A plantation administrative center -perfectly genuine too, I have no doubt. But down underground, hm-m-m.”
A section of dusty earth opened metal lips and the ship descended into a hangar. Langley followed the rest out and into the austere rooms beyond. At the end of the walk there was a very large chamber; it held some office equipment and a tank.
Langley studied the tank with a glimmer of interest. It was a big thing, a steel box twenty feet square by fifty long, mounted on its own antigravity sled. There were auxiliary bottles for gas, pumps, engines, meters, a dial reading an internal pressure which he translated as over a thousand atmospheres. Nice trick, that... was it done by force-fields, or simply today’s metallurgy? The whole device was a great, self-moving machine, crouched there as if it were a living thing.
Brannoch stepped ahead of the party and waved gaily at it. His triumph had given him an almost boyish swagger. “Here they are, you Thrymkas,” he said. “We bagged every one of them!”
15
The flat microphone voice answered bleakly: “Yes. Now, are you certain that no traps have been laid, that you have not been traced, that everything is in order?”
“Of course!” Brannoch’s glee seemed to nose-dive; all at once, he looked sullen. “Unless you were seen flying your tank here.”
“We were not. But after arrival, we made an inspection. The laxity of the plantation superintendent which means yours—has been deplorable. In the past week he has bought two new farm hands and neglected to condition them against remembering whatever they see of us and our activities.”
“Oh, well—plantation slaves! They’ll never see the compound anyway.”
“The probability is small, but it exists and it can be guarded against. The error has been rectified, but you will order the superintendent put under five minutes of neural shock.”
“Look here—” Brannoch’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Mujara has been in my pay for five years, and served faithfully. A reprimand is enough, I won’t have—”
“You will.”
For a moment longer the big man stood defiantly, as if before an enemy. Then something seemed to bend inside him, and he shrugged and smiled with a certain bitterness. “Very well. Just as you say. No use making an issue of it; there’s enough else to do.”
Langley’s mind seemed to pick itself up and start moving again. He still felt hollow, drained of emotion, but he could think and his reflections were not pleasant. Valti was hinting at this. Those gazabos in that glorified ashcan aren’t just Brannoch’s little helpers. They’re the boss. In their own quiet way, they’re running this show.
But what do they want out of it? Why are they bothering? How can they gain by brewing up a war? The Thorians could use more land, but an Earth-type planet’s no good to a hydrogen breather.
“Stand forth, alien,” said the machine voice. “Let us get a better look at you.”
Saris glided forward, under the muzzles of guns. His lean brown form was crouched low, unmoving save that the very end of his tail twitched hungrily. He watched the tank with cold eyes.
“Yes,” said the Thrymans after a long interval. “Yes, there is something about him- We have never felt those particular life-currents before, in any of a hundred races. He may well be dangerous.”
“He’ll be useful,” said Brannoch.
“If that effect can be duplicated mechanically, my lord,” interrupted Valti in his most oleaginous tone. “Are you so sure of the possibility? Could it not be that only a living nervous system of his type can generate that field... or control it? Control is a most complex problem, you know; it may require something as good as a genuine brain, which no known science has ever made artificially.”